Ed Whitacre, the CEO of AT&T, is up to his old tricks again. Check out what he said in the Financial Times this week:
"I think the content providers should be paying for the use of the network.... Now they might pass it on to their customers who are looking at a movie, for example. But that ought to be a cost of doing business for them. They shouldn't get on [the network] and expect a free ride."
Yep, that's the same Ed Whitacre who, a couple months ago, said : "What they [Google, Vonage, and others] would like to do is to use my pipes free. But I ain't going to let them do that."
I've got a message for Ed: No one is asking for a "free ride" here. Your job is to sell high-speed broadband connections to people like me. So when I use AT&T to go online, I've already paid the freight for Google's, or Vonage's or a movie site's content. You don't get to charge for it again. And it's particularly outrageous that you think those websites should then pass your fees along to consumers like me! Americans are already paying higher prices for broadband - with slower connection speeds - than people in many other parts of the world.
You can send your own message to Ed Whitacre and other business leaders by going to www.commoncause.org/HandsOffMyInternet. And feel free to post a copy of your letter in the comments section below.
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